Bigcommerce Review : Ecommerce Software & Shopping Cart Platform

OVERVIEW

BigCommerceis a privately held technology company that develops e-commerce software for businesses. The company was founded in 2009 and has 456 employees with headquarters in Austin, Texas and additional offices in San Francisco, California and Sydney, Australia.

BigCommerce was founded in 2009 by Australians Eddie Machaalani and Mitchell Harper following a chance meeting in an online chatroom in 2003. In August 2009, the two relaunched a hosted version of Interspire Shopping Cart called “BigCommerce”and opened its first U.S. office.

BigCommerce was 100% bootstrapped until July 31, 2011, when it closed $15 million in Series A funding from General Catalyst Partners. At the time, the company announced its client count had grown 680% year over year.

In January 2012, BigCommerce launched a $2 million integration fund for developers, which was used to fund 31 applications in the BigCommerce App Marketplace. The company subsequently received $20 million in Series B financing in September 2012, led by General Catalyst Partners and Floodgate Fund.

In July 2013, BigCommerce raised another $40 million in Series C financing from Revolution Growth, an investment firm led by former AOL Chief Executive Steve Case. In November 2014, the company announced $50 million in series D financing from investors SoftBank Capital, Telstra Ventures, and American Express,bringing the company’s total funding to $125 million.

In April 2015, BigCommerce made its first acquisition, buying Zing, a Texas-based company that sold checkout software to retailers.

In May 2015, the company launched a new version of its platform, BigCommerce Enterprise, for high-volume retailers.

In June 2015, the company announced a new CEO. Brent Bellm, former HomeAway president and PayPal Europe CEO, succeeded BigCommerce co-founder Eddie Machaalani, who remains with the company as executive chairman of the board.

In October 2017, BigCommerce began offering in-app shopping through Instagram to U.S.-based merchants using their platform. The offering was part of a gradual roll out of Instagram’s in-app shopping feature that began in November 2016.

In April 2018, BigCommerce completed a $64 million round of funding led by Goldman Sachs.

Build your online store with BigCommerce

Build the ultimate shopping experience

BigCommerce revolutionary design platform lets you create stores that engage shoppers and make more sales. Choose from the best responsive ecommerce templates on the market or build a fully custom site.

Increase sales with the latest features

Best-in-class marketing and conversion tools enable BigCommerce merchants to grow at 2x the industry average. Drive more traffic, convert more visitors and seamlessly sell on multiple channels from a single location.

Get unparalleled performance

BigCommerce merchants benefit from industry-leading performance and stability, including an average uptime of more than 99.99% and sites that load fast for maximum conversion.

Optimize your ROI

BigCommerce cloud-based platform is 1/4 the cost of on-premise solutions like Magento. You’ll spend less time managing technology and get regular updates with new, cutting-edge features.

Enterprise ecommerce for high-volume brands

BigCommerce Small Business and Enterprise Plateform is the leading cloud ecommerce platform for businesses making $1 million or more in sales per year

According to the market research study by Ipsos, BigCommerce enterprise ecommerce software enables retailers to grow at 28% year over year, nearly twice as fast as the industry average. Fortune 500 and Internet Retailer 1000 brands choose BigCommerce to power exceptional shopping experiences, grow sales and improve performance across all their channels.

A superior ROI for enterprise commerce

BigCommerce provides the best ROI in the industry. With BigCommerce enterprise cloud commerce solution, you no longer have the burden of owning infrastructure.

Money previously spent on hardware, hosting and maintenance can be reinvested in growing sales. Your technical team can focus on high-value projects versus implementing upgrades and fixing broken code.

BigCommerce intuitive interface empowers your marketers to do their jobs without IT involvement. Most importantly, BigCommerce continuously innovate to ensure you stay relevant in the fast-paced commerce industry.

A highly extensible platform, built to scale

BigCommerce Enterprise features an open architecture that’s designed to seamlessly integrate with your business today and grow with it in the future. One-click integrations with leading ecommerce applications enable you to easily connect to business-critical software. Flexible APIs and webhooks make building your own integrations fast and cost effective, increasing your operational efficiency and ensuring BigCommerce platform meets your business needs.

A powerful API for custom and complex builds

BigCommerce open architecture doesn’t limit API calls. Transfer data in real time with nearly any part of their platform, including Products, Customers, Orders, Payments and Shipping.

A thriving application ecosystem

BigCommerce extensible API powers a robust ecosystem of integrations with best-of-breed technologies, built both by BigCommerce and our tech partners.

Extraordinary shopping experiences

The BigCommerce Enterprise theme framework is the best solution available for building fully customized ecommerce sites that engage and convert shoppers. Advanced development tools enable faster and easier coding, which reduces go-to-market time. BigCommerce sites are shaped by enterprise ecommerce best practices and optimized for mobile shopping, faster page loads, better search results and higher conversion.

Local staging environment

Simultaneously preview changes across desktop and mobile displays using your real-time catalog, without pushing updates to your live store.

Personalized shopping experiences

Personalize your site using our flexible codebase to better engage and convert shoppers, including changing language, highlighting products and much more.

No proprietary languages

BigCommerce sites are developed in the popular Handlebars language, with support for a wide range of HTML, CSS and JavaScript libraries.

Partner with elite designers and developers

BigCommerce Enterprise ecommerce platform offers the most flexible framework for designing world-class online stores. That attracts the best designers and developers in the business. BigCommerce partner network includes global agencies that specialize in building beautiful storefronts that amplify brands.

Higher conversion rates

BigCommerce retailers grow nearly twice as fast as the ecommerce industry average because they have access to the best selection of built-in conversion tools on the market. BigCommerce enable you to make the most of your site traffic by removing shopping friction and increasing checkouts.

Faceted search

Improve search relevance and boost conversion up to 10% with dynamic filtering on size, color, price or your own custom attributes.

Optimized checkout

The BigCommerce Enterprise shopping cart incorporates every checkout best practice to increase conversion by up to 12%. That includes single-page checkout, dedicated SSLs, address verification, mobile optimization, accountcreation, guest support and more.

One platform for all your sales channels

BigCommerce is much more than an enterprise ecommerce platform. It’s a comprehensive system for connecting all your online and offline channels and managing them from a single location.

Sell on marketplaces & social media

BigCommerce is the only enterprise ecommerce platform that features native integrations with online marketplaces and social media. Sell on Facebook, Pinterest, eBay and more.

Seamlessly add & manage channels

The BigCommerce Channel Manager is the ultimate multi-channel selling solution. Add new online channels with just a few clicks. Process all sales from a single location, with automated syncing to eliminate overselling.

Integrate with your POS of choice

BigCommerce Enterprise doesn’t lock you into a homegrown point-of-sale system. BigCommerce’ve partnered with the best modern POS providers to give you the largest selection available.

Reliable, secure and scalable ecommerce hosting

Consumers have more choice than ever before when it comes to shopping online, so modern retailers can’t afford to have an outage or a slow-loading site. For retailers making $25,000 a day, a 1-second page load delay costs more than $500,000 a year. BigCommerce enterprise ecommerce software is engineered to give you the highest uptime and fastest sites available. BigCommerce use blazing-fast servers and a lightweight, speed-optimized frontend framework to maximize conversion and improve SEO.

99.99% server uptime

BigCommerce Enterprise has one of the best uptimes in the industry. BigCommerce high-capacity servers have delivered 100% uptime during Cyber Week for four years straight. An optional SLA offers added insurance.

Bank-grade security

BigCommerce use the same multi-layered approach to security as the major financial institutions. BigCommerce built-in DDOS protection alone could cost you $5,000 a month on self-hosted platforms.

Infinitely scalable

BigCommerce cloud-based systems automatically scale to meet any demand, no matter how much traffic or how many orders per minute you’re receiving.

Choose how you accept payments

Unlike other platforms, BigCommerce don’t believe in limiting your choice of payment solutions or locking you into BigCommerce preferred gateway. You have the freedom to use any of BigCommerce native integrations with the best providers in the industry, without transaction fees.

A range of options to suit your needs

BigCommerce integrate with leading payment gateways, digital wallets and consumer financing options, and even let you accept payments in 250+ local methods through Adyen.

Keep more of your revenue

You won’t pay penalties or transaction fees for using your preferred gateway, and BigCommerce’ve pre-negotiated special processing rates with PayPal to reduce your costs even further.

Multi-layered fraud protection

BigCommerce let you choose how you manage fraud, with multiple layers of protection available. That includes built-in fraud tools from payment integrations like PayPal, Cybersource and Klarna, plus advanced solutions like Signifyd for the most control.

BIGCOMMERCE BEST FEATURES

BigCommerce powerful ecommerce software gives you all the features you need to build an online store, but BigCommerce is much more than a website builder. We give you the tools to streamline your online business so you can focus on what you do best — selling.

Set Zones & Methods: Set up all the locations to which you’ll be selling, then choose specific shipping methods for each area.

Real-Time Quotes From Major Carriers: These carriers include UPS, USPS, FedEx, Australia Post, Royal Mail, and Canada Post. You can also set static quote rules, and your shoppers view all their tailored options when checking out.

Integrated with ShipStation & ShipperHQ: For labels from other carriers, shipping quotes from multiple points of origin, and other advanced shipping functions, BigCommerce steers you toward its integrations with ShipStation and ShipperHQ.

Multichannel Selling

Built-in Integration With Square POS: For in-person selling, Square is the option you’ll see promoted in your dashboard (as well as on the BigCommerce website), or you can peruse the app marketplace. Note that Square will be your payment processor for both online and in-person processing if you set up Square POS.

Sell On Popular Marketplaces: BigCommerce has native integrations with eBay, Google Shopping, and Amazon. Plus, you can use apps to sell on Etsy, Jet, the Walmart marketplace, and more.

Sell On Social Media: Use Buyable Pins on Pinterest, set up a Facebook Store, and tag products on Instagram.

Sell Globally: Accept multiple currencies and calculate international shipping and tax rates. BigCommerce now also includes multilingual support.

The best ecommerce website design platform

Build and design a better online store to grow your brand

BigCommerce is the leading platform for creating beautiful, intuitive ecommerce websites that enhance your brand and engage shoppers. Grow your sales by building a gorgeous site using BigCommerce out-of-the-box themes or advanced customization framework.

Responsive ecommerce templates that drive sales

BigCommerce offer more than 80 carefully curated, fully responsive designs to give your brand an edge against your competition. BigCommerce library of free and premium templates includes visually stunning designs for all major industries and catalog sizes. Whether you’re a large sporting goods shop or a growing apparel brand, BigCommerce have a theme for you.

Build a site in ½ the time

BigCommerce industry-best ecommerce website design platform allows developers to build sites in half the time it takes on other solutions using modern development tools like Sass and Webpack. BigCommerce also offer the first and only SaaS local development environment, enabling you to use your live product catalog, quickly test or make changes, and simultaneously preview your site across mobile, desktop and tablet.

Use of virtual machine commands or a runtime engine in conjunction with BigCommerce web authoring tools is not permitted or supported by BigCommerce.

The best solution for selling on mobile

With over 50% of traffic coming from mobile devices, your store needs to leave the perfect impression on every device. Their ecommerce templates are fully responsive and come equipped with a mobile-optimized checkout. And BigCommerce’re the only ecommerce platform that natively integrates with Apple Pay and PayPal One Touch to improve your mobile conversion.

Connect with ecommerce website design experts

BigCommerce has a global network of professional ecommerce designers and developers who can help you build the ultimate shopping experience for your business. BigCommerce top-tier partners undergo a rigorous certification process to make sure they’re experts on the BigCommerce platform. Partners like Groove, Indaba and IntuitSolutions have built ecommerce sites for some of the world’s most successful brands.

Streamline your operations

Increase efficiency and win back time with our scalable, extensible ecommerce platform.

Use the best ecommerce tools

BigCommerce has some of the leading ecommerce tools on the market already built into our platform. Right from BigCommercer control panel, you can use ShipperHQ and ShipStation for shipping, Avalara for tax automation, and more.

Integrate with leading applications

BigCommerce pre-built apps and integrations with leading third-party providers let you make the most of BigCommerce powerful platform without skipping a beat. Connect your online store with solutions for ERP, CRM, 3PL and much more.

Find the apps you need

Build custom solutions using our ecommerce APIs

Customize any aspect of your business or integrate any third-party tool using our powerful APIs. BigCommerce open API architecture makes it easy to build the exact solutions you need to streamline operations and expand your capabilities.

Bigcommerce support

Get expert help 24/7, with premium services available for Enterprise merchants.

Migration and onboarding help

Switching platforms or launching a new store can feel overwhelming, but BigCommerce dramatically simplify the process. You have access to BigCommerce onboarding phone team and catalog transfer services, and Enterprise plans include a dedicated consultant.

Support when and how you need it

BigCommerce offer 24/7 support via phone, email and chat. BigCommerce phone support is second to none, with nearly 90% of issues resolved on the first call. Find answers fast with BigCommerce in-depth support documentation, videos, and peer-to-peer Community.

Dedicated account management

BigCommerce Enterprise plans come equipped with dedicated account managers, giving you access to custom business advice and priority support. Their outstanding service has helped us earn a 99% retention rate for customers they assist.

Connect with certified professionals

Onboarding services

BigCommerce’ve migrated 20,000 stores from a variety of ecommerce platforms, including Magento and Shopify Plus. BigCommerce enterprise onboarding consultants will build and manage your custom launch plan, and work with BigCommerce data migration engineers to ensure a smooth transition.

Premium services

BigCommerce Premium Account Services team offers business recommendations and advice, with a dedicated point of contact available for larger merchants. BigCommerce Strategic Account Managers are focused on your success with BigCommerce, working directly with you to understand key issues and advocate for your needs.

Integrate with powerful ecommerce applications

The best selection of ecommerce business apps and integrations

BigCommerce marketplace has an industry-leading selection of third-party apps and integrations, all carefully curated to make sure BigCommerce only feature the best solutions. You can seamlessly connect your store to the software you need to sell effectively.

Accounting & Tax

Quickbooks Online

Xero

Avalara

TaxJar

Analytics & Reporting

LuckyOrange

Glew

Google Analytics

Catalog & Order Management

Stitch Labs

Inventory Planner

SKULabs

CRM & Customer Service

Live Chat

ZenDesk

Salesforce

Marketing

MailChimp

Privy

Justuno

Sales Channels

ShopKeep POS

Revel POS

ChannelAdvisor

Security

McAfee SECURE

Signifyd

Shipping & Fulfillment

ShipStation

ShipperHQ

AfterShip

Ordoro

Site Tools & Connections

OneSaaS

Zapier

Marketing & conversion apps to increase sales

Connect to email marketing and automation software like HubSpot, advertising and retargeting tools like Google AdWords, A/B testing suites like Optimizely, and more. BigCommerce wide assortment of enterprise-grade applications gives you access to advanced features to grow your business — in one click.

ERP integrations to streamline your operations

CRM apps to improve your customer experience

Better acquire, retain and market to customers by connecting to CRM software such as Salesforce, NetSuite and Zoho.

Build your own integrations with BigCommerce powerful API

BigCommerce flexible, open API lets you build custom integrations with whatever software you count on to run your business. Connect with all the most important parts of BigCommerce platform, including Products, Customers, Orders, Payments, Shipping and more. If you’re looking to build a custom integration, BigCommerce can recommend specialized developers who are certified on the BigCommerce platform.

Accounting apps to save time and reduce manual errors

Automate your taxes with Avalara

BigCommerce has partnered with Avalara to give merchants a complimentary Avalara AvaTax account. Avalara updates more than 100,000 taxability rules to calculate sales tax at checkout, saving you time, money and effort. You can connect to your AvaTax account to get advanced functionality like product-level tax, exemptions, address verification, reporting and integrated filing.

Accept online payments with your choice of providers

The best selection, the best rates, no penalties

BigCommerce offers a wide range of payment options to help you transact globally, increase mobile conversion and grow average order value — all at the industry’s best rates. BigCommerce give you the power to choose the solutions that work best for your business with no unnecessary transaction fees.

Authorize.Net

Skrill

PayPal

Stripe

Square

2Checkout

WePay/Chase

Grow mobile conversion with digital wallets

BigCommerce offers built-in integrations with the world’s most popular digital wallets, including PayPal, Amazon Pay, and Apple Pay. You can easily add a digital wallet to your store and allow shoppers to quickly check out using details stored with trusted third parties, which can significantly improve your mobile conversion.

Increase purchasing power with consumer financing options

To help you grow sales, BigCommerce’ve built in solutions that let you offer shoppers alternative payment options like financing, invoicing and installment payments at checkout. Offering consumer financing alone can increase average order value by 15% and incremental orders by 30%1.

Decrease fraud and chargebacks

BigCommerce includes multiple layers of protection to help shield you from fraudulent purchases, lost revenue and chargeback fees. BigCommerce native payment integrations like PayPal, Klarna and Amazon Pay include built-in fraud tools. BigCommerce also integrate with Signifyd, which offers guaranteed fraud management by reviewing every order placed on your store.

Improve conversion and cut costs with ShipperHQ

BigCommerce is the only cloud-based ecommerce platform that features a deep integration with ShipperHQ, the world’s most sophisticated shipping rate calculator and rules engine. Apply customized shipping rates to increase checkouts and eliminate overpayment for misquotes. Set rates based on product, category, customer group, quantity, destination, dimensions and more. Our integration also supports LTL freight, dimensional shipping, multi-origin and dropshipping.

Fast shipping setup

From the BigCommerce Shipping Manager, you can quickly set up all the locations to which you’ll be selling, then choose specific shipping methods for each area. Offer real-time carrier quotes, flat-rate shipping, or weight- or value-based rates.

Real-time quotes

Give your customers the most accurate shipping quotes available with real-time rates from major carriers like UPS, USPS, FedEx, Australia Post, Royal Mail, Canada Post and more.

Outsource fulfillment with dropshipping

Partnering with a dropshipper takes both product sourcing and order fulfillment off of your plate. Connect to providers like Doba and Ordoro to populate your store with proven products from massive catalogs and leave the shipping to the experts.

Print shipping labels and save

Whether you’re shipping out a few orders a day or thousands, ShipStation can save you time and money. BigCommerce seamless integration lets you efficiently and cost effectively ship products using your favorite carriers and fulfillment providers. Print shipping labels for USPS, UPS, FedEx, DHL, Canada Post and more, and save over 50% on USPS Post Office and online rates.

Increase sales with free shipping

Offering free shipping is a proven way to decrease cart abandonment. BigCommerce lets you enable free shipping for everywhere you sell, only to specific zones, only for specific products, or by creating a coupon code or discount rule limited by order total.

Get metrics that help you grow business

Two ways to make more confident decisions

BigCommerce is purpose-built to help you grow by revealing product and customer trends that can help you drive sales. Use their Ecommerce Analytics to see store performance, anytime. Or, choose actionable analysis each month with their premium service, Ecommerce Insights.

Focused metrics for merchants

Google Analytics is great for optimizing sites — but their Ecommerce Analytics and Insights reports give you deeper customer data so you can target, segment, and drive sales.

More details on Ecommerce Analytics and Insights

Ecommerce Analytics reports are part of your monthly subscription. Premium Ecommerce Insights reports are available at a low monthly cost and on a flexible, month-to-month basis.

Effortlessly sell everywhere with omni-channel integrations

A single hub for all your channels

BigCommerce offers a seamless approach to omni-channel retailing, serving as the hub for all your channels. BigCommerce’re the only ecommerce platform that natively integrates with eBay, Amazon, Facebook, Pinterest and Google Shopping.

Streamlined channel management

The BigCommerce Channel Manager is the easiest way to sell on multiple channels. Your online store’s inventory is connected to the marketplaces, social media and POS solutions of your choice. Manage all sales in BigCommerce, with automatic syncing to eliminate manual tracking and errors. Adding a new channel or connecting an existing one takes just a few clicks.

Sell on marketplaces

Get your products in front of millions of shoppers by listing on high-traffic marketplaces like eBay and Amazon.

Sell on social media

Shoppers can discover and buy your products on some of the world’s most popular social media platforms, including Facebook and Pinterest.

Sell in person

Connect your online store to the best point-of-sale solutions, including Square, ShopKeep and Springboard Retail. Your inventory is automatically updated whenever you make a sale, online or in person.

Sell to customers anywhere in the world

Global selling, simplified

The true potential of selling online is the ability to reach shoppers around the world. But not every ecommerce platform gives you the options you need to do that. BigCommerce includes features that let you sell anywhere, from international payment providers to native language support.

BIGCOMMERCE PRICE

BigCommerce’s pricing plan options include: Standard ($29.95/month), Plus ($79.95/month), Pro ($249.95/month) and Enterprise plans with pricing based on a customers online sales. Pro plan: Starting at $249.95/mo for less than $400k in online sales, +$150/mo for each additional $200k in online sales (up to $3m).

CONCLUSION

BigCommerce can provide such a comprehensive e-commerce platform at such relatively affordable rates is because e-commerce is their core product, which they give their undivided attention.

BigCommerce is one of the great shopping cart platforms out there, with adequate points to healthy the needs of most small businesses. The admin is effortless to use and the handy save issues are very professional.

BigCommerce tends to want built-in features over third-party apps, which ought to probably store you money in the long run, relying on the specific elements you need.

I recommend signing up for the free 15-day trial.Although you can’t promote while on the 15-day trial, you can study and use most of the facets and settings as nicely as set up your store to be launch-ready. VISIT BIGCOMMERCE

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